Johann Diedrick
Lately I’ve been looking through the videos of past visiting lecturers, specifically from last year that I was absent form the course because of the creative computing diploma, and I came across the video of the lecture with Johann Diedrick. He is a very interesting sound artist and engineer that creates installations, performances and software. He seeks to re-surface hidden histories in materials through the act of sonic encounter and listening, attempting to expose underlying narratives or concepts from such materials. His work has been widely praised by institutions and magazines, being showcased in galleries and festivals such as the Met museum and Ars Electronica. More information here.
a quiet life – is a sonic engineering and research group, directed by Diedrick. They research into different fields of computer sound, like machine learning and instrument design, organising workshops and events to share their findings and knowledge.
One of their projects that stood out for me is Flights of Fancy a machine learning software that classifies different types of bird sounds. As Diedrick explains in his website, the creation of this software came from current ecological problems in the marshes surrounding New York city. As industries spill in all their toxic wastes into the river, the flora and fauna of the place have been driven to the edge of extinction. Most of the birds of the area have been eradicated, and keeping track of the ones remaining has become a very difficult task. Through machine listening, this software is classifying the remaining species of birds, creating data of the environment in order to come up with solutions to rescue it. Diedrick explains that through listening we can uncover issues that we can not simply see, and through machine listening we can create a very powerful record of data that might make us understand issues in a clearer way.
An interesting aspect about this software and the machine learning model used, is that it was trained using images of the spectrograms of the sounds in the birds data set, instead of the audio files. I find it very interesting how these models work, even though they deal with sound, at the end of the day it continues to be under the category of computer vision.
Diedrick practice resonates a lot with my practice. I like the combination between sound arts and programming, both practices complementing each other. What I also would like to do that Driedrick does a lot is art research practice with the final form being a software, learning and research through a technical eye. Diedrick doesn’t have a direct inspiration in my portfolio project but I attempt to follow a profession similar to his, were I can do art projects and technology, that at the same time can be used as research.